Tuesday, January 26, 2010

The right-wing evangelical defamation
of Voodoo does not end with the
misrepresentation of the Bois Caïman gathering as a Satanic pact:
it
includes the accusation of the ritual sacrifice of human beings, and
the propagators of the libel include Haiti’s ambassador to the United
States.

In doing the research for my blog entry “The
Right-Wing
Evangelical
Libel
against
Haiti,” I was reminded at
times of the infamous blood
libels against my own people, the Jews. For the enlightenment of
any reader not familiar with this quaint and venerable practice (do I
have to explain that I am
speaking ironically? I suppose I must, to prevent stupid
misinterpretation.
All right, then: I am, or rather was just now, speaking ironically), I
will explain how it works. A gentile, usually a Christian boy, is found
dead, or disappears, or is believed to have disappeared. (An actual
human disappearance, or even a specific identity for the one supposedly
missing, is not necessary for the proceeding.) The story is then spread
that the victim was abducted by Jews who used him for a
ritual sacrifice—insert here details of crucifixion or whatever else
excites
violent indignation—and drank his blood or used it in making matzah.
Attacks on Jews, ranging from harrassment to mass killing and
expulsion, usually follow. The great age of blood libels was in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but they
continue
to
this
day. Forebears of mine suffered under them (though
as far as I know they were not physically
attacked or killed) in Rhodes and Damascus in
the year 1840. Needless to say, the practice reflects more on its
Christian inventors, who celebrate the onetime sacrifice of a
human
being by (at least in some denominations) ritually drinking his blood,
than on the
victims, whose law expressly
forbids
them
to
consume
even
the
blood
of
animals (and no, human
blood,
even
one’s
own,
does
not
get
a
pass).

The lie spread by right-wing evangelical Christians that
Haiti was born of a pact with the devil, and more generally that
Haitian Voodoo is a form of Satanism, struck me as similar to the
anti-Jewish blood libel in that both
are cases in which people of strongly held but narrow, ill-founded, and
ill-informed opinions project
their superstitious fears upon others. In the end, though, I
did not include this comparison in the piece, as it seemed to me a bit
of a stretch. For one thing, it does not seem to be a libel against
Haitians or vodouisants to
say that the fabled meeting at Bois Caïman involved the ritual
sacrifice of a pig and the drinking of its blood: there is historical
evidence of such an event, and besides that, so far as I
know, Haitians by and large find nothing offensive in the idea. (This
Haitian
writer deems the ritual as recounted in the historical sources “a
traditional Dahomean
blood
oath,” Dahomean religion being one of the African sources of Haitian
Voodoo.)
For another thing, what evangelicals impose on the story to defame
Voodoo is not the sacrifice of an animal but the idea of a pact with
the devil—hardly as inflammatory a charge as attributing to someone the
ritual
murder of a child and the drinking of its blood. (Some Haitians
have been reported to believe the meeting
at Bois Caïman to have involved the sacrifice of a human being: a
black slave in some versions, a French colonial soldier in others. See
Markel Thylefors, “‘Our
Government
is
in
Bwa
Kayiman’:
A
Vodou
Ceremony
in
1791
and its
Contemporary Significations,” Stockholm
Review
of
Latin
American
Studies, No. 4, March 2009 (PDF),
p.
79.
But
even
the
evangelicals
have
not,
so
far
as
I
know,
stooped
so
low
as
to try to get people to believe this.)

I was disconcerted, however, when I happened on an article published in
the New York
Sun on August 19, 2003 under the title “Disturbing Disclosures of
Human Sacrifice” (for the moment I withhold the identity of the writer;
the article can be found on line, but, apart from the version available
through the Lexis service, which I quote here, only in an unreliable
altered version). The article begins:

In the wake of several defections from the embattled
Haitian regime, some disturbing disclosures about alleged human
sacrifice have thrown a new light on the ruling authorities in Haiti.

Executions early in the year 2000, prior to the fraudulent elections of
that summer and fall, were intended to ensure the return of
Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the presidency he had reluctantly
relinquished in February 1996. So said Johnny Occilius, a member of the
mayoralty of Cite Soleil, who defected last month.

Among the most scandalous of his disclosures was the gruesome sacrifice
of the first baby of a young mother, Nanoune Myrthil. The date was
important, Mr. Occilius said, in an interview. It was February 29, the
last day in a month that will recur in four years. And “the lamb” must
have been a first-born baby. Thus, the Myrthil baby was “at the right
place at the wrong time,” Mr. Occilius said. The administrator of the
State University Hospital in Port-au-Prince, also known as General
Hospital, Marie-Antoinette Gauthier, made possible the snatching of the
baby only 72 hours after birth.

Somewhere in the countryside north of the capital, the sacrifice took
place that same night. The live baby was crushed in a mortar with a
heavy pestle. Officiating was Voodoo sorcerer Henri Antoine from St.
Marc, the same thug who founded the pro-Aristide so-called popular
organization “Bale Wouze,” or “Clean Sweep” in
English. . . .

Meanwhile, Jean Michel Mercier, former assistant mayor
of Port-au-Prince, confirmed the disclosures of Mr. Occilius and added
that the execution last year of a powerful leader of a “popular
organization” was connected to the baby crime.

A baby stolen from the hospital and crushed to death in a mortar under
the
supervision of a Voodoo sorcerer! And this in a report in The New York Sun—not exactly a
publication of the first rank, but still a newspaper with some
professional standards,
one would think. Initially, my search for confirmation or
disconfirmation of the report turned up nothing decisive. I found
reports that confirmed that the newborn child of a woman named Nanoune
Myrthil had indeed been abducted from the General Hospital of
Port-au-Prince around that date. But the only
materials that I could
find bearing on the alleged ritual sacrifice of the baby were reports
of the accusations of Occilius and Mercier that added nothing
pertinent. (Note, by the
way, that verifying that a baby was stolen from the hospital and never
found, however shocking that fact is by itself, does not license the
conclusion that the baby was sacrificed in a Voodoo ritual. Babies do
get stolen, usually either by people who want to raise them as their
own or by people who want to sell them to others to raise.)

Several features of the article raise suspicions.
The article appeared, not in the “Opinion” section, but in the
“Foreign” section of the newspaper; yet it hardly reads like a piece of
reportage. Take the first sentence: how can a
mere allegation of human
sacrifice constitute a revelation
that throws a new light on something? By what right does the writer,
in the third
paragraph (and in the title, though that may be an editor’s
contribution), identify Mr. Occilius’s charges as a “disclosure,” a
term that implies veracity? Why, in the fourth
paragraph, does the writer report the events of the alleged sacrifice
in direct speech, as if reporting facts, rather than attribute the
assertions to Occilius? The
sentence that immediately follows it (which I omitted from the
quotation above), far from calming these
suspicions, only exacerbates them:

The bestial crime boggles the mind, and some people
question the veracity of Mr. Occilius’s disclosures. But who would have
thought that men infected with the AIDS virus in South Africa believe
that they can be healed by having intercourse with a young virgin!

Who would have thought that the writer of a news
report, rather than simply stating the facts of what a certain person
said, would overtly take that person’s side? And who would have thought
that a news reporter would make use of emotional language, strained
analogy, and rhetorical question?

Plainly the article is not the work of a competent
professional reporter. But why would the writer, whoever he was (his
name was on the page, but at this point I made nothing of it), take so
partisan a
position in a news article? Further, the fact that my Web searches
turned up
no other
reportage of so monstrous an act, other than a few other mentions of
Occilius’s allegations, intensified doubt about those allegations,
though it did not constitute a refutation of them. Why would someone
make up such a story,
anyway?

Then I found this:
a
transcript
and
translation
of
an
interview
conducted
in
Haitian
Creole
with
Sonia
Desrosiers
Lozan,
a former employee of the National Port
Authority of Haiti who claims to have
been present at the ritual killing of the child of Nanoune Myrthil.
(The Web
page
on which I found the transcript is dated October 30, 2009, but the
interview was
certainly conducted well before that date, as I found the same
transcript reproduced on a
page dated March 5, 2007. The latter page
contains a narrative, written by Stanley Lucas, of the night’s events,
apparently reconstructed
from the interview, but adding many details, as if
the writer had himself been present.) Ms. Desrosiers reports that the
sacrifice took place at the home of then-President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide. She gives the names of several persons supposedly present:
President
Aristide; Grandra, the houngan
(Voodoo priest; the embellished version by Lucas, who seems to have
been misled by the word “priest,” has him initially
appearing in the robes of a
Catholic priest); Marie Antoinette Gauthier, the director of the
General
Hospital, who, according to Desrosiers, brought in the baby (Desrosiers
says that it was
this that
led her to conclude that the baby was the one taken from the
hospital); General Wiltan
Lherrisson, the
head of the Haitian army; Jocerlerme Privert, the minister of the
interior; Jean-Marie
Chérestal, prime minister of Haiti during 2001 and 2002;
Annette
Auguste, popularly known as “So Anne,” a
Haitian singer and political activist for Lavalas,
Aristide’s party; and others. (The
Lucas version adds Aristide’s wife Mildred to the company and describes
the sweat on her upper lip.)

According
to Desrosiers, all the participants took turns working the mortar to
crush the baby, all the while “singing mystical songs and crying
that Aristide’s five-year term was non-negotiable. . . .
Mystical songs, throwing water, lighting candles, something totally
diabolic.” After the ceremony was completed,
she says, the houngan gave
the president the heart of the baby in a bottle which he placed
in his private room, and the baby’s remains were interred in the
cemetery of Port-au-Prince, in “a sector where
they put the remains of the ceremonies. . . . When they
do these
ceremonies they always bury the remains of the dead so when they want
to light a candle and call the spirit back . . . they often
do that.”

Is it possible that this woman believes in the truth of her
account of events? Certainly. Indeed, it is likely that she does so:
even without
hearing the
original broadcast, one gets the impression from the translation of her
words
that she is entirely sincere. Is it possible that her
account of events is true? Certainly; in the same respect that it is
possible that President Aristide and his associates are all humanoid
aliens from another planet or gaseous entities made to appear fleshly
by
telepathic mind control, namely that there is no logical
contradiction involved in entertaining such bizarre and fantastic
hypotheses. But is there any reason to give this account of events any
credence?

On the “yes” side, there is the fact that Desrosiers seems
sincere in her testimony, that she held an official position in
Port-au-Prince at the
time of the reported event, that her
narrative is coherent and detailed, and that two other persons,
Occilius and Mercier, make similar assertions. On the “no” side is the lack of hard
evidence that Satanic ritual sacrifice has ever occurred anywhere,
and
the extravagant improbability of such elements of her tale as that
there could
be a sector of the Port-au-Prince cemetery, known only to the
malefactors, where the remains of sacrificial victims are
regularly interred; that several highly placed government
officials including the president of the country and the director of
its largest hospital would conspire and participate in such an act; and
that, such a thing being done, no
evidence of its occurrence would come to light besides the
testimony of one self-declared witness and two other persons. That
Mercier was not a witness, even purportedly, is evident from the transcript and
translation of a broadcast of Radio Vision 2000 in Port-au-Prince
on August 13, 2003 in which the reporter, after relaying Mercier’s
claims about the abduction and ritual murder of the Myrthil child, adds:

With this, Mercier confirms what Johnny Occilius said about
that
issue.
He says that he got that information from current Lavalas Deputy
André Jeune Joseph, who apparently took part in that
meeting.

I have not been able to discover any relevant further information about
this Mr. Joseph.

It is worth noting, by the way, that while Occilius is reported to have
said that it was “important” to the perpetrators that the baby be
snatched on February 29, a date that occurs only once in four years, a
news
report
from
February
of
2001—two years before Occilius made
his allegations of ritual sacrifice and even longer before Desrosiers
gave her interview—gives the date of the theft as the night of February
26, 2000. Desrosier gives it as February 27. Also, Desrosiers
identifies the presiding houngan
as a man named Grandra, while Occilius identifies him as Henri Antoine.
Such divergences are hardly the weakest features of their stories, but
they do add weight to the “no” side of the balance.

Another way to look at the matter is to consider the testimony of
Desrosiers as a given fact and to consider what is the most credible
explanation of it. There are three principal candidates: (1)
that she really did experience the events that she recounts, or events
much like them; (2) that she is lying; and (3) that she is
confabulating. It is obvious that, for the reasons given earlier, (2)
and (3) have vastly greater probability than (1). Between the two of
them, I consider (3) more probable than (2). Desrosiers’s story, with
its lurid detail, has much in common with the “recovered
memories”
of
Satanic
ritual
abuse that flourished in the 1980s in
this country and elsewhere, initiated by a fraudulent memoir called Michelle
Remembers and spread by quacks whose trade consisted in “helping”
people to “remember” similar events. Of course, the case of Desrosiers
does not involve any claim of a memory repressed and recovered, and in
any case, it concerns events from only a few years before her recital
of them. But her case exhibits the same conformity of apparent
memories to a widely used, pre-existent template.

Of course, to discredit the testimony of Desrosiers is not to prove
that no such event occurred. As I said before, it is possible that such
an event did occur. But all probability is against it, no strong
evidence is for it, and to believe
in its occurrence on the strength of the facts that have come to light
would be preposterous and irresponsible.

So how did this tale arise? An interesting document to look at in this
connection is this item,
a
page
dated
January
21,
2001
written
by
Yves
A. Isidor, a
Haitian-American
professor of economics and spokesman of an anti-Aristide organization.
Isidor asserts, citing “a senior member of Aristide’s Lavalas Family
Party, also known as the party of Satan, the party of death, who
pleaded with us for anonymity,” that Aristide “reportedly was bathed in
November
[of 2000, presumably] in the blood of a dead Haitian by voodoo
priestess . . . Marie-Anne
Auguste, commonly known as So An.” This could be a sketchy and garbled
version of the Desrosier-Occilius-Mercier story or an
independently developed rumor, but in view of the order of the reports,
it is most likely the original story from which the
more
detailed version was subsequently derived by combination with the
actual event of
the disappearance of the Myrthil baby. The unnamed senior member of the
“party of Satan” who was Isidor’s source may be Mercier. Note that in
Isidor’s version, the blood sacrifice took place in November rather than
February of 2000. This is because, according to Isidor, the ritual was
designed to influence the American presidential election to secure that
the presidency go to Gore, who was likely to be friendly to Aristide,
rather than to Bush, who was likely to be hostile. (Clearly, the
spirits of Voodoo were no match for the Florida voting system or the
justices of the US Supreme Court. —I kid, I kid.)

Finally, I return to the question of the motives of the people
spreading these
tales. Obviously, they were actuated by animosity toward then-President
Aristide. One element of that animosity that is of particular interest
to me is the
religious one. Jean-Bertrand
Aristide was ordained as a Catholic priest of the Salesian order in
1983, though he was expelled from that order in 1988 on account of his
involvement in leftist politics and left the priesthood in 1994
(source: Wikipedia).
I
do
not
know what position he may have taken in public regarding Voodoo
early in his career, but the piece by Isidor from 2001 makes clear that
at least some of his political enemies imputed Voodoo practices to him
long before he gave legal recognition to Voodoo as a religion in April
of 2003.

Aristide’s recognition of Voodoo,
according to this
contemporary
news
report
from the BBC, “means that voodoo
ceremonies such as marriages now have equal standing with Catholic
ones.” The meaning given to the event by evangelical Christians was
quite another matter, as the following passage from an article
published in Christianity Today
on October 1, 2003 indicates:

“The government said they are going to turn the
country
entirely to voodoo. The Christians say we are going to turn the country
totally to the Lord Jesus Christ,” said Jean Berthony Paul, founder of
Mission Evangelique du Nord D’Haiti. . . .

Pastors and missionaries in St. Marc organized a rally on August 14, a
key voodoo
holiday, to counter the witchcraft they say voodoo involves.
Missionaries have also circulated unconfirmed reports that a child was
abducted from the town hospital to be made a voodoo sacrifice.

They fear Aristide is planning to renew a 200-year-old
national “pact with the devil” on January 1, 2004. Many Haitians credit
the country’s independence to voodoo.

The “voodoo holiday” of August 14 is the commemoration of the gathering
of rebel slaves at Bois Caïman in 1791. The content of the
“unconfirmed reports” is, obviously, the blood libel against Aristide.
And, as I reported in a
previous
post, evangelicals have identified Aristide’s official
recognition of Voodoo as a religion as itself a renewal of Haiti’s
supposed pact with the devil. The interesting fact here is that
“missionaries,” meaning, of course, evangelical missionaries, are
identified as the ones spreading the blood libel.

I have one final piece to add to the puzzle that I have been assembling
here. In a
previous
entry, I quoted the puzzling reply of the Haitian
ambassador to the remarks of Pat Robertson about the pact with the
devil supposedly formed by Haiti’s founders. Instead of dismissing
Robertson’s tale as superstitious nonsense, the ambassador, after
describing the ways in which the revolt of the Haitian slaves against
their French masters has benefited the United States, said ambiguously:
“So what pact the
Haitian made with the devil
has helped the United States become what it is.” I was a long way into
the researches that I have presented in this entry before I realized
why the name of the author of the article from 2003 on the “disturbing
disclosures of human sacrifice” seemed familiar to me: it was the same
as the name of the Haitian ambassador, Raymond A. Joseph. The biographical
page
on
Ambassador Joseph in the
Web
site of the Embassy of Haiti in Washington, DC states that he is “mostly known as a
journalist.” The page states also that he translated the first
New Testament and Psalms in
Haitian Creole
for the American Bible Society,
an
evangelical
Christian organization, and that he is a
graduate of Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College (Illinois), both
evangelical Christian institutions.

It is plain why the ambassador did not repudiate Robertson’s tale of
the pact with Satan as the nonsense that it is: he believes in it
himself. He is an evangelical Christian, and he is himself part of the
effort to demonize Voodoo as Satanism, as well as the effort to
demonize former President Aristide and his associates as practitioners
of blood sacrifice. The evangelical libel campaign against Haiti and
the religion of many of its citizens may have originated outside the
country, but it now has exponents among Haitians, including the one who
represents his country to the United States.

I do not defend the political record of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, nor do
I hold any brief for the practice or the beliefs of Voodoo. But those
who use demonic fantasies to defame either the man or the
religion by that action alone set themselves in an even less credible,
indeed a despicable, position. If they have legitimate objections to
make, either in politics or in religion, let them make them without
lies, hysterical fantasies, and demagoguery. We have suffered enough
from blood libels.

Added 26 January 2010, 22.30 EST:

After writing and posting this entry I discovered a Web page that expounds in a concise and linear fashion most of the matters that I had so laboriously worked out by hours and hours of research, as well as much else concerning the preceding political developments: Richard Sanders, “Demonizing Democracy: Christianity vs. Vodoun and the Politics of Religion in Haiti,” from the magazine Press for Conversion, November 2008, published by the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT), a Canadian organization. I quote the most pertinent part, in which I have replaced the references that originally appeared in endnotes with links in brackets:

When
Aristide
and
thousands
in
Haiti’s
popular
government
were
then
illegally removed from power, the elite’s
outrageous propaganda was actually taken seriously by the
coup-empowered regime. The de facto government’s CIDA-funded
“Department of Justice” even used these outrageous rumours to arrest
and illegally imprison prominent supporters of Aristide’s Lavalas
government. In mid-2004, a U.S. human rights delegation to
Haiti
reported that:

Members of Fanmi
Lavalas have been using the word witch-hunt to describe the ongoing
repression of Lavalas. . . . We were shocked to find that this term can be
taken literally. While we were in Haiti, a wild story was being
circulated by the media and Haitian authorities. It claimed that a baby
was sacrificed during a ceremony attended by many members of Lavalas in
the year 2000. While we initially took this to be at the level of
tabloid sensationalism, it became clear that this ludicrous charge is
being pursued by the current de facto authorities.

On three occasions
individuals have gone on National Television, reportedly at the behest
of the Minister of Justice, to describe their participation at this
so-called ceremony. Despite the fact that the stories told by these
individuals are not even consistent. . . . Haitian authorities are using
these out of court, unverified statements as the basis for issuing
arrest warrants for Lavalas officials. These charges are also the
justification for continuing to hold [prominent Lavalas activist and
community leader] Annette Auguste. [Ref.]

Two
particularly
virulent
enemies
of
Haitian democracy who have pushed
these absurd, religious smear campaigns are Yves A.Isidor, a professor
of Economics at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, and Raymond
Joseph, a former Wall Street Journal financial reporter who
became the 2004 coup-regime’s ambassador in
Washington.
Isidor,
who
accused
Ms.
Auguste of being Aristide’s “voodoo medium,”
said she bathed him in human blood to place a curse George W. Bush and
to ensure the election of Al Gore in 2000. Isidor’s grotesque
story was later embellished by Joseph who said that as part of their
Vodoun ritual, a newborn baby was crushed with a heavy pestle in a
giant mortar. [Ref.]

The
most
well-connected figure who aided and abetted this particular
psychological warfare campaign is Stanley Lucas, director of the
right-wing Washington Democracy Project’s program on
Latin
America
and the Caribbean. In 2007, this long-time Haitian
representative of the U.S. government-funded International Republican
Institute, disseminated extravagantly detailed slander regarding the
alleged Vodoun infanticide that was supposedly engaged in by President
Aristide and his closest political allies. [Ref.]

To
establish
his credentials and lend credibility to these outrageous
lies, Lucas’ website displayed dozens of photographs of himself posing
with business executives, Premier Jean Charest, U.S.-backed heads of
state, Afghan “tribal leaders,” U.S. senators, congressmen,
ambassadors, three former U.S. Secretaries of State, a former National
Security Advisor, a former CIA director, and other such so-called
“friends” of Haiti.

Yves Isidor, Raymond Joseph, Stanley Lucas—the very same sources to which I traced the story, though I like to think that I have added a bit of further substantiation to the case by combing through Sonia Desrosier’s testimony and the rest of it.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

The idea that the nation of Haiti was born of a pact with
the devil, far from being Pat Robertson’s
invention, is a libel widely circulated among
right-wing Evangelical Christians. Like many people who reject critical
rationality, they mistake repetition for confirmation and plausible detail for evidence.

In two previous posts (”Pat
Robertson,
Propagandist
for
Atheism?”, January 15; “Second
Thoughts about
What
Pat
Robertson
Said,” January 19), I
discussed Pat Robertson’s attribution of Haiti’s dire history
to a pact with the devil supposedly sworn by a group of slaves in 1791.
It turns out that the idea of such a pact is not a
product of the brain of Pat Robertson at all: it is a libel that has
been circulated among Evangelical right-wingers for years. What is most
disturbing about this libel is, first, the insidious way in which it
mimics the procedures of history in order to promote a religious and
political agenda, and second, the success that it has had in
propagating itself among the Evangelical faithful.

For purposes of this investigation, it will be useful to distinguish
clearly between the following two historical claims:

(1) That in mid-August of 1791, a group of slaves planning an uprising
against their French colonial masters met at Bois-Caïman to
perform a Voodoo rite (the
preferred spelling among scholars seems to be “Vodou,”
though I
have also seen it spelled “Vaudou,” “Voudou,” and “Voudon”; I will
follow the popular spelling).
Although there is a considerable amount of confusion and conflict in
the historical sources (which I hope to discuss in a subsequent post)
over the specifics of this event, such as when it took place, who led the rite, and what kind of animal was sacrificed, and although one scholar has even
defended the thesis that no such event ever took place, there is no
denying either that there is credible historical evidence of such an
event or that it is widely believed and celebrated by Haitians as the
starting point of the founding of their nation. I will refer to this
event as “the meeting at Bois Caïman.”

(2) That the participants in the meeting at Bois Caïman swore a
pact with the devil to serve him for 200 years. Note that this claim
admits of two different interpretations. It could be taken to mean
either (a) that those present at Bois Caïman went through the
motions of sealing a pact with a supposed spirit, believed by them to
be real, and known as the devil or Satan; or (b) that they really did
enter into a pact with a perfectly real devil. Plainly, it is only on
interpretation (a) that this claim can be considered within
the discipline of history, for it is only on that interpretation that
it admits of confirmation or disconfirmation by evidence. On
interpretation (b), the thesis is beyond the reach of possible evidence
and belongs to myth, or perhaps demonology, but not on any account to history. As it happens, there is no evidence
that supports this thesis even under interpretation (a). I will refer
to the uninterpreted and ambiguous thesis that the slaves at Bois
Caïman “swore a pact with the devil” as “the Satan thesis.”

On the day on which Robertson’s inflammatory utterances were broadcast
on The 700 Club (January 13, 2010), Chris Roslan
of the
Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) posted a “Statement
Regarding
Pat
Robertson’s
Remarks
on
Haiti.” The concluding part of the statement
reads:

If you watch the entire video segment, Dr. Robertson’s
compassion for
the people of Haiti is clear. He called for prayer for them. His
humanitarian arm has been working to help thousands of people in Haiti
over the last year, and they are currently launching a major relief and
recovery effort to help the victims of this disaster. They have sent a
shipment of millions of dollars worth of medications that is now in
Haiti, and their disaster team leaders are expected to arrive tomorrow
and begin operations to ease the suffering.

So far as I can tell, this part of Roslan’s statement is entirely just.
The
final words of Robertson in that notorious
news
segment were: “Right now, we’re helping the suffering people, and
the suffering is
unimaginable.” The Web site Charity
Navigator gives Operation Blessing International, a relief
organization
belonging to CBN—presumably what Roslan is referring to as “his [viz.,
Robertson’s] humanitarian arm”—a rating
of 62.41, a rating that puts it in the highest possible rating
category. For comparison, Doctors Without Borders
USA gets 61.23
and Oxfam America 63.01. So I no reason to doubt that Robertson’s
organization is on the up-and-up and is doing good work.

The first part of Roslan’s statement is another matter entirely:

His [viz., Robertson’s] comments were based on the
widely-discussed 1791 slave
rebellion led by Boukman Dutty at Bois Caiman, where the slaves
allegedly made a famous pact with the devil in exchange for victory
over the French. This history, combined with the horrible state of the
country, has led countless scholars and religious figures over the
centuries to believe the country is cursed. Dr. Robertson never stated
that the earthquake was God’s wrath.

Let us work through this backward from the last sentence:

Dr. Robertson never stated
that the earthquake was God’s wrath.

Indeed he did not. But he
plainly implied that Haiti’s long history of suffering is due to the “famous pact with the devil” that, as Roslan delicately puts it, “allegedly” was sworn at Bois Caïman in 1791. (I won’t quote
Robertson’s words again, but you can read them in my first
post
on
the
subject. About that qualifier “allegedly,” more in a moment.) On
that view, there are only two possible explanations: either the
afflictions of Haiti are divine retribution for the pact, or they are
returns on the original bargain exacted by the devil himself. Either
way, they are the fault of Haitians, whether collectively or in the
persons of the leaders of the rebellion that led to the founding of the
nation.

This point was clearly grasped by an anonymous defender of
Robertson who on January 16 posted the following comment on Roslan’s
statement in a blog
titled Milennial
Perspective, one of several blogs under the heading “Rightly
Concerned” in the Web
site of the American Family Organization:

Leave it to the liberals, and those who do not understand
the difference
between a curse, and the assumption that “God hates Haiti.”
Point: If a person or a group of people make a deal, a pact with
another person or organization, then they are each beholden to the
other to uphold the terms of that pact. Any other person, outside the
realm of that pact, has no standing to interfere with the pact. So, the
Haitians of that day made a deal with the devil. They got what they
wanted, and in return, Satan got their souls. This contract will be in
effect until the Haitians, as a nation, reject that pact by confessing
that sin to the Father, God. Until that happens, He has no control—or
limited control—over what happens to them. So their suffering falls
upon their own shoulders, not His. Neither is the blame for the
disaster His fault.

(The quoted phrase “God hates Haiti” is presumably an allusion to a piece by
Lisa Miller that appeared in Newsweek
on January 15 under that title.) The same position is taken by Bryan
Fischer in an entry in his blog Focal Point, another blog in “Rightly
Concerned,” in an entry titled “In
Defense
of Pat Robertson” (January 15):

Robertson did not say
that the earthquake was a result of this curse, or was God’s fault.
Instead, Robertson attributed Haiti’s grinding poverty to this compact
with Satan. Jesus himself said that the thief comes only to “steal and
kill and destroy.”

But surely there is a theological problem here. I do not know how well
the idea that God has “no
control, or limited
control” over what befalls the Haitians squares with the views of
Robertson or of his followers, but the idea that the Almighty can have
his hands tied where Satanic pacts are concerned sounds highly
unorthodox to me. Such a view is squarely rejected by the Reverend Dr.
Gary
Cass of the Christian
Anti-Defamation
Commission, who, in a piece titled “1.7
Billion Reasons to Defend Pat Robertson” (January 14), writes
the following sobering words:

The modern cynic chaffs [sic]
at any suggestion that there may be a connection between
historical realities and unseen spiritual
influences, or as the Bible calls it God’s “blessing or cursing.”
Although most people are very comfortable with the notion that God
blesses people, we are not at all comforted with the terrifying
prospect that Almighty God might also curse.

The overwhelming majority of Americans believe in God and /or moral
causality. Eastern religions call it Karma, but Christians call it
God’s Providence. I wonder if the reason that so many hate Pat is
because he expressed what many Americans don’t want to face—the moral
and spiritual dimension of our lives. . . .

Agree or disagree with what Pat said, it was well within the bounds of
historic Christian theology. Maybe that’s the real problem after all.

The last quoted paragraph is in agreement with the position of atheist
Ronald Lindsay, who, in a
blog
post that I discussed in my
first
post
on
this
subject, cited Robertson’s remarks as an
exhibition of the irrationality of religious belief. I
argued in my own post that Lindsay’s conclusion was overstated, as
there are
varieties of religious belief that do not presume that it is possible
for human beings to discern the effects of divine providence. When I
offered
this criticism in a comment on Lindsay’s post (comment no. 6, under the
name “Kritikos”), he generously granted the point, and restated his position
as follows (comment no. 8):

Kritikos is quite correct: my statement should have been
explicitly
qualified. Robertson’s comments highlight the irrationality of belief
in a personal deity who can cause storms and earthquakes, intervenes
continually in human affairs, and responds to petitionary prayer, that
is, the type of deity that appears to be accepted by most believers.

To get back to the main point, though: whether Robertson thinks that
the earthquake was God’s doing or the devil’s, he plainly implied that
it
is a consequence of the actions of Haiti’s founders, and therefore
ultimately their fault.

This history, combined with the
horrible state of the
country, has led countless scholars and religious figures over the
centuries to believe the country is cursed.

The phrase “this history” here
refers to the pact with the devil supposedly sworn by Haiti’s original
liberators. But who has concluded that the country is cursed? Some
religious figures? Undoubtedly. “Countless” ones? Perhaps; if
rank-and-file believers are included, then certainly so. But
“scholars”? What sort of “scholar” interprets historical facts, let
alone tales of the supernatural presented as facts, as evidence of a
“curse”? What sort
of
person takes writers who so interpret history as “scholars”? I believe
that the answer is to be
found under “religious figures,” or more precisely among adherents of
Pat Robertson’s variety of Evangelical Protestantism. It is not clear
if this particular
statement is an argument from authority or an attempt to diffuse the
responsibility for Robertson’s outrageous claims among other, unnamed
sources. Either way, it gives no credibility to the idea that Haiti is
under a curse.

(As a resident of greater Boston, whose baseball team was
held for 86 years to be under a “curse” that only ended in 2004 when
the Red Sox
finally won the World Series, I must add at this point that Robertson
and company are not using the word “curse” in any kind of playful or
ironic spirit. I do not doubt that there are Red Sox fans who believe
just as solemnly and sincerely in the reality of the Curse
of the
Bambino as Robertson and his allies do in the reality of the
Haitian
pact with the devil. I merely wish to caution those who use the word
less seriously, as an ironic way of describing a persistent pattern of
misfortune, that that is not what
is at issue here.)

His comments were based on the
widely-discussed 1791 slave
rebellion led by Boukman Dutty at Bois Caiman, where the slaves
allegedly made a famous pact with the devil in exchange for victory
over the French.

“Allegedly,” says Roslan; but alleged by whom? “Famous,” says Roslan;
but famous among whom? Among Haitians what is famous, and much
celebrated, is the story of how, in August 1791, a group of slaves met
to plan an uprising against their French colonial masters, an occasion
that culminated in a Voodoo rite in which a pig was sacrificed. As I
indicated earlier, there
are divergent accounts of who took part in
this affair and where and when it took place. What is clear is that
none of the historical sources make any mention of a pact with the
devil. Who or what, then, is the source of Roslan’s tale?

I cannot identify an ultimate source, but Roslan or whoever prepared
the page on which his statement appears offers a proximate one. Next to
his statement
are several links
under the heading “Related Information,” one of which reads “Haiti:
Boukman, Aristide, Voodoo and the Church.” It leads to a piece under that
title
written by Elizabeth Kendal and dated 2004, on a page in
the Web site of the John Mark Ministries, an Evangelical Christian
organization in Australia.
This appears to be the same Elizabeth Kendal who is
identified by the Christian
Monitor as Principal Researcher and Writer for the World
Evangelical Alliance Religious Liberty Commission. Her version of the
history of the founding of Haiti includes this passage:

On 14 August 1791, a black slave and
witch doctor named Boukman led the slaves in a voodoo ritual. They
sacrificed a pig and drank its blood to form a pact with the devil,
whereby they agreed to serve the spirits of the island for 200 years in
exchange for freedom from the French. The slave rebellion commenced on
22 August 1791, and after 13 years of conflict, the slaves won their
independence. On 1 January 1804 they declared Haiti the world’s first
independent black republic. An iron statue of a pig stands in
Port-au-Prince to commemorate the “Boukman Contract”.

I have found the contents of Kendal’s piece credulously reproduced
on
numerous Web pages, including one in Polish, all
posted since January
13. The transformation of Dutty Boukman or Boukman Dutty (I have seen
his name given both ways) from a priest of the Voodoo religion into a “witch doctor” does not raise confidence in Kendal’s competence as a
historian, though it does give the measure of what Chris Roslan had in
mind when he invoked unnamed “scholars.”

But there is that bit at the end about the statue of a pig. A
detail of such specificity, concerning a present, or at
least recent, state of affairs, lends an air of
verisimilitude to the whole story. Bryan Fischer, in the
piece
cited previously, adds another such detail:

It is a matter of
historical record that Haiti’s independence from France is, in fact,
rooted in a pact with the devil made on August 14, 1791 by a group of
voodoo priests led by a former slave named Boukman. The pact was made
at a place called Bois-Caiman, and the tree under which a black pig was
sacrificed in this ceremony is still a shrine in Haiti. Annual voodoo
ceremonies are conducted every August 14 on this very site, essentially
renewing the covenant with darkness each summer.

So not only is there, according to these sources, a statue of a pig
in
Port-au-Prince
that commemorates the Boukman contract with the devil but the tree
under which the
original pig was sacrificed at
Bois-Caïman is a shrine at which Voodoo ceremonies are performed
every August 14. One can imagine the effect of such details on
Evangelical readers of these materials: they would no doubt see them as
decisive proof of the truth of the story.

But any person examining
these matters skeptically would have to wonder, first, whether the
details are actual facts, and second, whether they constitute any sort
of confirmation of the story of the pact with the devil.
Take the pig first. Is there such a statue? On a message board for
Haitian Americans, two
participants in a thread on this question recollect seeing an iron
statue of a pig at a
certain location in Port-au-Prince (one
locates it at la Place de l’Italie au
Bicentenaire, . . . across from the old legislative palace,” the
other “near the post office”; I do not know if these refer to the same
location), but neither of them knows of any indication that the statue
is connected in any way with Boukman. Remember that the question is not
whether Haitians celebrate the memory of the meeting at Bois
Caïman: there is no
doubt that many do so. What is at issue is whether there was any pact
with the devil at that meeting. The existence of an iron statue of a
pig is no confirmation of this. The same applies to the supposed annual
commemorative gatherings. Such details provide concreteness, and thus
may have the psychological effect of enhancing the verisimilitude of
the Satan thesis; but they constitute no evidence for it whatever.

[Added after posting, 23 January 2010, 15.40 EST: It has occurred to me that the pig statue, if it exists, could have been installed as a punning salute to the city itself: the first word of “Port-au-Prince” (the “t” is silent) is homophonous with “porc,” the French word for “pig.”]

The only other bit of evidence
that anyone in this crazy circuit, to my knowledge, has ever presented
to support the Satan thesis is Bryan Fischer’s assertion that “on
national TV, Haiti’s
ambassador to the U.S. openly admitted, while criticizing Robertson,
that Haiti did in fact enter in to this pact with the devil.” He is
referring to the following remarks made by Ambassador Raymond Joseph on
the
Rachel
Maddow
Show on January 13:

I would like the whole world to know, America
especially, that the
independence of Haiti, when the slave rose up against the French and
defeated the French army, powerful army, the U.S was able to gain
the
Louisiana Territory for $15 million. That’s 3 cents an acre. That’s
thirteen states west of the Mississippi that the Haitian slaves’ revolt
in Haiti provided America. . . . So what pact the
Haitian made with the devil
has helped the United States become what it is.

But while Joseph speaks slowly and deliberately, and appears to
have a good command of English, the crucial last sentence is very
unclear. As it stands (and I have transcribed his utterances verbatim),
it is simply ungrammatical: the phrase “what pact”
does not make sense in that context. It is possible that by “what
pact” Joseph meant simply “the pact,” in which case he would indeed be
making the admission that Fischer attributes to him. But while the
ambassador’s English is imperfect, it does not seem to be as crude as
that. It is far more likely that by “what pact” he meant “whatever
pact.” On that assumption, he is most likely merely saying that,
whether there was a pact with the devil or not, the actions of Haiti’s
original liberators have benefited the United States.

Of course, it is possible that Ambassador Joseph does believe the
Satan thesis. That would be at best exceedingly feeble
evidence of its truth, but it would certainly be evidence that the
thesis has
gained acceptance among Haitians. This finding was reported by
Jean
Gelin, a Haitian-American agricultural scientist and Christian
minister, in a three-part article titled “God, Satan, and the Birth of
Haiti,” published on the Web site Black and Christian in 2005. In the
first
part, Gelin writes as follows:

Have you ever heard how some preachers or theologians try
to explain the unspeakable misery that is crippling most of Haiti’s
population of 8 million? Everywhere you go, from your television screen
to the Internet, what you are most likely to find is a reference to a
spiritual pact that the fathers of the nation supposedly made with the
devil to help them win their freedom from France. As a result of that
satanic alliance, as they put it, God has placed a curse on the country
some time around its birth, and that divine burden has made
it virtually impossible for the vast majority of Haitians to live in
peace and prosperity in their land. . . .

The worst part
of the whole picture is that the
story is believed by many sincere Christians in America and around the
world; and not only do they believe it, they also spread it as fact.
The tragedy of our age is that repeated lies are often mistaken for the
truth, especially when repeated long enough.

But did the idea of a pact with the devil originate abroad or in Haiti
itself? Gelin does not take a firm position on that question:

It’s hard to know where the idea of a divine curse on Haiti
following the purported satanic pact actually originated, whether from
foreign missionaries or from local church leaders. In his book Ripe
Now: A Haitian Congregation Responds to the Great Commission,
Haitian pastor Frantz Lacombe identified a ‘dependence mentality’ in
the leadership of the Haitian church, which resulted from the way the
Christian faith was brought to the country, historically and through
various denominations. Apparently, this unfortunate manner of thinking,
which tends to emulate the worldview and culture of North American and
European Christian missionaries, has permeated the general philosophy
of the Haitian church on many levels, including church planting, church
management, music and even missionary activities.

In that context, I would not be surprised if the satanic pact idea
(followed by the divine curse message) was put together first by
foreign missionaries and later on picked up by local leaders. On the
other hand, it is equally possible that some Haitian church leaders
developed the idea on their own using a theological framework borrowed
from those same missionaries who subsequently propagated the message
around the world.

Wherever the idea originated, it is now being spread over the world by
Evangelical Christians. Though imposed on the story of the Bois Caïman
meeting, a story which itself has a basis in historical evidence, the
crucial element of Satanism is a fabrication. I suspect that many
Evangelicals are unable to grasp this point because for them the
identification of Voodoo with Satanism seems self-evident. This can be
seen, for instance, in a passage written by photographer Shawna Herring
in a blog entry dated
January 15, 2009 concerning a visit
to Haiti that she had recently made (ellipsis in original):

To clear up any superstitious idea here I want to just
say that Voodoo
is REAL. It’s not just some little revengeful idea with dolls and
pins . . . it’s a real partnership that was made with the
devil himself. 203
years ago [sic] when Haiti was under French rule, they were enslaved by them
and in an effort to gain their freedom, Voodoo priests from all over
came together and literally signed a written contract and made a deal
with the Prince of darkness that stated that if he could grant their
freedom, they would serve him for 200 years. He did and they have. It’s
no joke.

Note the movement here from saying that Voodoo is real (which it is, in
the sense that it is a religion really practiced by many Haitians) to
saying that the “partnership with the devil” established more than 200
years ago is real. For this writer, as for others of her religious
outlook, the two are the same. The detail of a “written contract,”
which I have not seen anywhere else, is also a nice touch. I suspect
that it is merely the product of misrecollection or faulty
transmission, but it may be worth checking up later to see if other
members of the crazy circuit are citing Ms. Herring’s statement as
further proof of the Satan thesis.

By the way, if you are wondering how Evangelicals can believe that
Haiti is still suffering the consequences of a pact with the devil
forged more than 200 years ago for a period of 200 years, the answer
is, first, that the term of 200 years is supposed to have begun not
with the forging of the pact in 1791 but with the liberation of Haiti,
which was effected on January 1, 1804; and second, that when President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, on April 8, 2003, gave official recognition to
Voodoo as a religion in Haiti, he thereby, as Bryan Fischer puts it in
the post cited earlier, “extended the pact.” Fischer does not state the
duration of the extension or the reason for which Aristide would do
such a thing.

Of course, it is easy to see this detail as an instance of facts being
interpreted, not to say rewritten, to suit a rigid belief. No doubt, it
is that, but to ascribe it to that principle alone is to miss the point
that for Evangelicals like Fischer, it is axiomatic that Voodoo is
Satanism. I have little doubt that even if it were possible to look
into the past as we look at old television shows and to
watch the meeting at Bois-Caïman unfold, Fischer, Kendal, Robertson,
and all of their like would find the proceedings to be a complete and
thorough confirmation of their beliefs.

That rigidly held religious beliefs yield unsound anthropology—as they do unsound history, science, ethics, politics, and so on—is hardly news.
The interesting thing about the Evangelical libel against
Haiti is the way in which its proponents not only offer it as a “true
story” (Robertson) and “a matter of historical record” (Fischer), but
support it with historical and factual details that, however little
value they have as evidence, are well calculated to persuade the
unwary.

One final reflection. As noted at the beginning of this piece, Pat
Robertson’s humanitarian organization Operation Blessing International
has been contributing to the relief effort in Haiti. I have no doubt
that his followers and other people who propagate the libel of Haiti’s
founding pact with Satan have been making generous contributions, in
money and labor, to that effort. Nor do I doubt the sincerity of those who receive and repeat this falsehood. But
it is a falsehood, and not an innocent one. It is blameworthy for the
disregard of evidence and fact that engender it, the superstitious
attitude that it sustains (it is almost amusing to see people who
attribute literally earth-shaking powers to the devil trying to pin the
charge of Satanism on others), and the damage that it does. This damage
consists in defaming the Haitian people and the founders of their
nation as Satanists; putting the blame on them for misfortunes that are
no fault of theirs; shifting attention from the real causes, past and present, of Haiti’s afflictions, and thereby diminishing the chance of improving conditions there.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

What is wrong with what Robertson said is what is wrong with a great deal of religious thinking. Explaining wherein the fault lies is not easy.

William Blake, Job

I have some emendations to make to my previous
entry, on Pat
Robertson’s theological explanation of the sorrows of Haiti.

(1) In that entry, I
observed that, for all the outcry against Robertson’s remarks, there
has
been almost no
discussion of what exactly makes them so
outrageous. Subsequently, I discovered a piece by Lisa
Miller, published in Newsweek
on line under the sardonic title “Why
God Hates Haiti,” that addresses the
question that I had thought neglected. After a brief account of Haiti’s
history of misfortune, Miller comments as follows on Robertson’s
remarks:

In his narrow, malicious way, Robertson is making a First
Commandment argument: when the God of Israel thunders from his
mountaintop that “you shall have no other gods before me,” he means it.
This God rains down disaster—floods and so forth—on those who disobey.

But Robertson’s is a fundamentalist view. It’s so unkind and
self-righteous—and deaf, dumb, and blind to centuries of theological
discourse on suffering by thinkers from Augustine to Elie Wiesel—that
one might easily call it backward. Every Western religious tradition
teaches that mortals have no way of counting or weighing another’s
sin.

I was heartened to read this piece, for two reasons. First, it goes
beyond a mere emotional reaction to Robertson’s
remarks to address issues of the nature and consequences of religious
belief, as I think that one must do to bring to light what it
is about those remarks that makes them deserving of condemnation.
Second, it reminds us that
Robertson’s remarks are deplorable even in a religious
perspective—perhaps especially so. Not just any old religious outlook
will lead one to the conclusion that Haiti’s afflictions are the
consequences of Haitians’ having done things displeasing to God, not
even if you throw in Robertson’s ignorant and bigoted identification of
the Creole religion of (some) Haitians with a Satanic cult. No; it
takes, in Miller’s apt word, a particularly backward theology to do
that. (Ignorant, bigoted, backward, arrogant, callous, inhumane,
smug, fatuous—one thing for which you have to give Pat Robertson
credit is that he provides work for lots of adjectives!)

(2) It was rash of me to dismiss Robertson’s purported “true story”
about a pact with the devil as “just more of
the sort of lurid fantasy habitually extruded by the brains of
right-wing religious fanatics like [him].” It is surely something
more baneful than that. I offered the surmise
that “in [Robertson’s]
view any religious practice much different from the Evangelical
Protestantism with which he is comfortable is Satanic worship.” That
may be so, but it does not take account of the fact that the Haitians
are of largely
black African origin, as is the Vodou religion whose rites Robertson
equates with Satanism. It is possible that Robertson’s
bigotry is purely religious and not racial in nature, but, I think, not
likely.
The suggestion of an underlying racial bias adds to the ugliness
of his remarks.

(3) I think that I was a bit glib about the relation between
believing in God and the habit of attributing specific events to divine
designs. I took for granted that the latter
is separable from the former—that it is possible to believe in God
while forswearing all judgments about divine intentions behind worldly
events. Certainly the two are separable in principle. But the fact
(assuming it to be a fact, as I think it is) that the vast majority of
religious believers make such judgments is an indication of how
difficult it is to have the one without the other. To believe that
everything that happens does so in accordance with divine providence
while making no judgments about how specific events bear a
providential meaning would surely greatly reduce the comforts of
religious life for most believers. On this point as on many others, the
more that religious
belief is purged of irrational elements, the less emotional
appeal it can hold for most people.

(4) In my attempt to account for what was outrageous
in Robertson’s remarks, I think I conflated two questions that require
separate answers: (a) what
principle led Robertson to such conclusions? and (b) what
makes his conclusions so obnoxious? I would still say that his remarks
rest on a presumption on his part of being able to identify God’s
designs in worldly affairs.
That presumption, combined with his bigoted assessment of Haitian
history (see point (2) above), led Robertson to the conclusion that
Haiti’s misfortunes are the
return on a Satanic bargain, whether they are effected by Satan himself
as part of the deal or by God in retribution for the original pact. The same
presumption plainly underlies Robertson’s grandiose,
politically opportunistic explanations of the September 11 attacks, the
flooding of New Orleans, the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, and the
incapacitation of Ariel Sharon by a stroke (all explained in the previous
entry).

But what makes such
conclusions obnoxious is something more. It is, as Lisa Miller points
out in the passage that I quoted earlier (see (1) above), the
presumption of being able to identify and weigh the sins of
others—always, of course, with favor to oneself and disfavor to the
others. Robertson embraces a religious doctrine according to which
believers of said doctrine are deserving of God’s favor and
non-believers deserving of
divine retribution. To say that such a view is baseless, superstitious,
or implausible (all of which I say it is) fails to touch on what is
most deplorable about it, namely its self-serving arrogance and
presumption. Robertson’s conclusions are certainly generated by faults
of reasoning and judgment, but what is most objectionable in them is a
matter of the human posture that emerges from his faulty reasonings and
judgments. (I acknowledge that what I have written is not entirely
clear; it seems to me that the question that I have been trying to
answer—what is so outrageous about Robertson’s remarks?—does not yield to the familiar terms of either ethics or logic as commonly practiced.)

(5) A further point to be made about the evil done by Robertson and
those who share his fondness for imputing earthly disasters to divine
causes is that they reinforce a lack of interest in the demonstrable
natural causes of such disasters and thereby reduce the likelihood of
remedy. Elizabeth McAlister sums the matter up well in a piece for CNN
titled “Why
Does Haiti Suffer So Much?” (January 18, 2010):

For social scientists, there is nothing metaphysical about the
question “Why Haiti?” Longstanding structural reasons have produced a
dysfunctional system long in crisis. Beginning as a French slave
society, the nation was founded at a severe disadvantage. France
demanded enormous payment for abandoned property after the revolution,
starting a cycle of debt that was never broken.

Deep and abiding
racism prevented the U.S. and Europe from recognizing Haiti for 60
years. Trade was never established on even terms. The military ruled
the state, culminating in the brutal Duvalier dictatorship, which the
U.S. supported.

No robust civil society developed—there’s no
vigorous tradition of PTAs and town planning boards. A brain drain
evacuated top talent from the country, while the U.S.-subsidized farm
industry sent surplus crops to Haiti, undercutting local prices there.
Farmers abandoned their lands, flocked to the capital, and built the
shanty towns that have now collapsed into rubble, burying the innocent
and vulnerable, strong and powerful alike.

The suffering Haitians are enduring is a natural disaster worsened
by
human-made conditions.

Robertson cited the disparity between the comparatively good
fortunes
of the Dominican Republic, on the eastern half of the island of
Hispaniola, and the terrible ill fortunes of the Republic of Haiti, on
the western half of the same island, as evidence of the supernatural
causation of Haiti’s misfortunes—as if no natural explanation were
possible. The more that people embrace this kind of superstitious
thinking, the less likely it is that anything will ever be done about
the actual causes of suffering. (Chances are bad enough; that is no
excuse for making them worse.) An earthquake is an uncontrollable
natural event; the substandard
building
construction that makes an earthquake fatal to tens of
thousands of people is not. Heavy rains are an uncontrollable natural
event; the deforestation
that makes such rains result in deadly landslides is not. And so on.

(6) Finally, no discussion of religious responses to the disaster in
Haiti can be complete without some consideration of the Book of Job.
Lisa Miller’s piece opens with the sentence: “Haiti is surely a Job
among nations.” Subsequently, she quotes Rabbi Harold Kushner, the author
of When Bad Things Happen to Good People
(New York: Anchor Books, 1981), which is among other things a
meditation on the Book of Job. (What Kushner is quoted as saying, by
the way, is: “I think that it’s supreme hubris to think you can read
God's mind.” I was struck by the fact that the rabbi chose the Greek
“hubris” rather than the Hebrew “chutzpah.” But on reflection, I
saw the justice of the choice: only the Greek word denotes a
transgression upon divine prerogatives, the Heberew word signifying only a
transgression upon human ones.) Plainly, if Haiti is a Job, then
Robertson is a Job’s comforter of the worst sort. Kushner in his book
provides a useful schema for understanding what that means:

To try to understand the book [viz., Job] and its answer, let us
take
note of three statements which everyone in the book, and most of the
readers, would like to be able to believe:

A. God is all-powerful and causes everything that happens in the
world. Nothing happens without His willing it.

B. God is just and fair, and stands for people getting what they
deserve, so that the good prosper and the wicked are punished.

C. Job is a good person.

As long as Job is health and wealthy, we can believe all three of
those
statements at the same time with no difficulty. When Job suffers, when
he loses his possessions, his family, and his health, we have a
problem. We can no longer make sense of all three propositions
together. We can now affirm any two only by denying the
third. . . .

Job’s friends are prepared to stop believing (C), the assertion
that
Job is a good person. (42–43)

A characteristic of the author of When
Bad
Things Happen to Good People
that impresses the reader from the
beginning is his humanity—a characteristic
not universal among bearers of clerical titles, as recent events remind
us. In the first chapter of the book, titled “Why Do the Righteous
Suffer?”, Kushner disposes of the familiar attempts to reconcile the
sufferings of the innocent and the just with belief in God—“They did
something to deserve it,” “It’s for their own good,” “It’s for the best
in
the long run,” “God will make it up to them in the next life,” and so
on—not so much for being unconvincing answers to a theoretical
conundrum (though he does find them to be that) as for failing to offer
the afflicted a possibility for reconciliation with God. His
alternative solution is that God does
not cause or allow all of our suffering: some things really do just
happen, for no divinely providential reason at all. In terms of the
schema above, Kushner gives up statement (A).
In theological terms, he gives up the doctrines of divine
omnipotence and providence: “God can’t do everything,” he says in the
title of his seventh chapter (although, he adds, “he can do some
important things”).

As strongly as Kushner’s ethos
appeals to me, and as humane as I find his theological view, his
attempt to derive the latter from the Book of Job seems to me to have
little textual foundation. To me, the view implied by the Book of Job
is just the view that Kushner attributes to Job himself:

Job sees God as being above notions of fairness, being so powerful
that no moral rules apply to Him. God is seen as resembling an Oriental
potentate, with unchallenged power over the life and property of his
subjects. And in fact, the old fable of Job [i.e., the folk tale
posited by biblical scholars as the antecedent of the scriptural text]
does picture God in just that way, as a deity who afflicts Job without
any moral qualms in order to test his loyalty, and who feels that He
has “made it up” to Job afterward by rewarding him lavishly. (46–47)

This is, in fact, the only view of God that I find in the text. To
me it seems that God figuratively picks Job up by the scruff of the
neck and thunders at him, “Can you compare your powers to mine? No, you
can’t! So shut up!” (38:1–40:2
and 40:6–41:26);
to
which
Job meekly
replies, “Yes, Sir; I will, Sir” (40:3–5
and 42:1–6).
The theological lesson taught by God’s answer to Job, so far as I can
tell, is either that divine might makes right or that God’s power is so
far beyond our comprehension that it is senseless for us to apply our
notions of justice to God. If any of the three propositions in
Kushner’s scheme is to be given up, it must proposition (B), that God
is just—not because it is false, but because when we attribute justice
to God, we really have no idea of what we are talking about. Kushner
takes the passage about Leviathan (40:25–41:26)
to
mean,
literally, that God
is only able with great effort to subdue the giant sea serpent, and
thus to mean, figuratively, that “even God has a hard time keeping
chaos in check and limiting the damage that evil can do” (49–50).
Rabbi, you’re a mentsh for trying to find such
a humane view in scripture, but I just
don’t see it there.

Friday, January 15, 2010

There have been many reports of what Robertson said about Haiti and
many condemnations of it; what is missing from public discourse is an
account of what exactly is outrageous about what he said.

First, just so that it’s clear what I’m talking about, here are the notorious words uttered by Pat Robertson on his program The 700 Club on January 13, 2010 (transcription from Media Matters, where the video can also be seen):

And, you know, Kristi, something happened a long time ago
in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under
the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever. And they
got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, “We will serve
you if you will get us free from the French.” True story. And so, the
devil said, “OK, it’s a deal.” And they kicked the French out. You
know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since,
they have been cursed by one thing after the other. Desperately poor.
That island of Hispaniola is one island. It’s cut down the middle. On
the one side is Haiti; on the other side is the Dominican Republic.
Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, et cetera.
Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island. They need to have and we
need to pray for them a great turning to God.

Of course, Pat Robertson’s notion of what constitutes a “true story”
can be gauged by the crackpot theory of a two-hundred-year-old plot for
global domination by Jewish bankers, Freemasons, the “Illuminati,” and
other Satanists that he expounded in his 1994 book The New World Order. An account of its contents may be found in Michael Lind’s Up from Conservatism: Why the Right Is Wrong for America (New York: Free Press, 1996), pp. 99–120, or on line in “New World Order, Old World Anti-Semitism,” an article by Ephraim Radner that appeared in Christian Century for September 13, 1995. A single paragraph from Radner’s article will give you the flavor of Robertson’s thinking:

Robertson traces the historical progress of this
conspiracy, back to Lucifer and his machinations in antiquity. In the
modem era the conspiracy has been promoted through a small secret
society founded in late 18th-century, Bavaria called the Illuminati,
whose members purportedly infiltrated Freemasonry, organized the French
Revolution, recruited Friedrick Engels and other communists to their
cause and orchestrated the Bolshexik takeover of Russia. Through their
control of international banking, the Illuminati-dominated servants of
Satan, according to Robertson, have imposed a system of national and
private credit and interest that has saddled the nation with
debilitating and enslaving debt, robbing the American people at once of
their independence and their control over their religious life.

Getting back to Robertson’s more recent outburst of paranoiac idiocy,
one should note that his so-called “true story” actually has what might
be described, if misleadingly, as a historical basis. The event that
presumably caused his febrile brain to conceive that the Haitians swore
a “pact to the devil” was a religious ceremony that reputedly took
place on August 14, 1791, at Bois Caïman in what is now Haiti under the
leadership of a slave and vodou priest or houdon named Dutty Boukman. (Whether this event actually occurred seems to be a matter of dispute.)
Boukman reputedly prophesied on that occasion that the slaves of
Saint-Domingue (as the colony occupying the territory of what is now
the Republic of Haiti was then called) would rise up and overthrow
their white masters. On August 22, an uprising began, in the course of
which Boukman was captured and killed by the French authorities. The
revolt continued without him, and in two years’ time, slavery in
Saint-Domingue was at an end. By the end of 1803, the Haitians had
overthrown and expelled the French (who, by the way, were under the
rule of Napoleon Bonaparte at the time; Napoleon III was not born until
1808).

The idea of a pact with Satan, as far as I can gather, is just more of
the sort of lurid fantasy habitually extruded by the brains of
right-wing religious fanatics like Robertson. I suspect that in his
view any religious practice much different from the Evangelical
Protestantism with which he is comfortable is Satanic worship.

But the benighted and delusional character of Robertson’s version of
history, however interesting, is really not the issue. What has made
his remarks notorious is the fact that they identify the earthquake in
Haiti, and other misfortunes that have dogged the history of that
nation, as divine retribution. This sort of utterance on his part is
nothing new. As Media Matters points out, Robertson has a record of indulging in such prophecy:

Remember when Jerry Falwell said, two days after the events of
September 11, 2001, “I really believe that the pagans, and the
abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are
actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the A.C.L.U.,
People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize
America, I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this
happen’”? He said that when he was appearing as Robertson’s guest on The 700 Club,
and Robertson’s reply was, “I totally concur.” Though Robertson seems
subsequently to have tried to put some distance between himself and
Falwell’s remarks (he described them
as “totally inappropriate,” a phrase that in the perverted moral
discourse of the present day passes for severe condemnation, though
really it only faults Falwell’s choice of occasion and not the content
of what he said), he also issued a written statement
that made his stance on this issue perfectly clear: “We have insulted
God at the highest level of our government. Then, we say, ‘Why does
this happen?’ It is happening because God Almighty is lifting His
protection from us.”

On The 700 Club for September 12, 2005, Robertson
intimated—though he did not plainly assert—that the occurrence of the
Hurricane Katrina disaster and terrorist attacks on the US was due to
the legality of abortion here (transcript again from Media Matters):

We have killed over 40 million unborn babies in America. I was reading,
yesterday, a book that was very interesting about what God has to say
in the Old Testament about those who shed innocent blood. And he used
the term that those who do this, “the land will vomit you out.” . . .
You look at the book of Leviticus and see what it says there. And this
author of this said, “Well, ‘vomit out’ means you are not able to
defend yourself.” But have we found we are unable somehow to defend
ourselves against some of the attacks that are coming against us,
either by terrorists or now by natural disaster? Could they be
connected in some way? And he goes down the list of the things that God
says will cause a nation to lose its possession, and to be vomited out.
And the amazing thing is, a judge has now got to say, “I will support
the wholesale slaughter of innocent children” in order to get confirmed
to the bench.

On The 700 Club for January 5, 2006, Robertson attributed
the stroke that paralyzed Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the
murder of his predecessor Yitzhak Rabin to their having tried to divide
God’s land, in defiance of biblical prophesy. Robertson said
(transcript again from Media Matters):

The prophet Joel makes it very clear that God has enmity against those
who, quote, “divide my land.” God considers this land to be his. You
read the Bible, he says, “This is my land.” And for any prime minister
of Israel who decides he going carve it up and give it away, God says,
“No. This is mine.” And the same thing—I had a wonderful meeting with
Yitzhak Rabin in 1974. He was tragically assassinated, and it was
terrible thing that happened, but nevertheless, he was dead. And now
Ariel Sharon, who was again a very likeable person, a delightful person
to be with. I prayed with him personally. But here he is at the point
of death. He was dividing God’s land, and I would say woe unto any
prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the EU,
the United Nations or United States of America. God said, “This land
belongs to me, you better leave it alone.”

By the way, the passage to which Robertson alludes is this one:

For behold, in those days and at that time, when I restore the fortunes
of Judah and Jerusalem, I will gather all the nations and bring them
down to the Valley of Jehoshaphat. And I will enter into judgment with
them there, on behalf of my people and my heritage Israel, because they have scattered them among the nations and have divided up my land,
and have cast lots for my people, and have traded a boy for a
prostitute, and have sold a girl for wine and have drunk it. (Joel
3:1–3, English Standard Version)

Setting aside the question of how anyone in his right mind can take a
bit of ancient literature purported to record divine utterances as a
title deed to an entire country, it is obvious that the passage
promises divine judgment upon foreign nations that have conquered the
land of Israel and dispersed the Israelites among other nations, not
upon Israelites in possession of the land who have given away some of
it.

So Robertson has been at this sort of thing for a while, and we can
expect that as long as he is with us he will provide more of it. What I
find curious, and rather frustrating, about the reaction to his remarks
in public written media is how elliptical the comments have been.
Trolling through the Google and Google News search results
for “Pat Robertson Haiti,” what I find, besides bare reports of what he
said, consists almost entirely of remarks or exclamations on how
outrageous, offensive, absurd, insane, moronic, insensitive, inhumane,
and so on it is, or he is. What I have not found is an explanation of
what exactly is outrageous, offensive, and so on about it.

Perhaps it is felt that the point is too obvious to merit explanation. Well, I grant that it is obvious that what Robertson said is outrageous and so on. I do not question that for a moment. What I want to know is: why is it outrageous? What makes it so? Is it the idea that the catastrophes that have befallen the people of Haiti—mutatis mutandis
the people of New Orleans, of New York City, of the United States, and
so on—are in some measure the fault of the victims? Is it the idea that
the victims, or some of them, or some of their ancestors, have incurred
God’s wrath? Is it the pretense to prophetic knowledge of how God works
in the world? Is it not the thoughts themselves but merely the act of
giving public utterance to them? (Were they merely, as Robertson said
of Jerry Falwell’s remarks about the September 11 attacks, “totally
inappropriate”?) It may well be that different people have different
reasons for being outraged by Robertson’s remarks. But if there are so
many reasons, why have I heard so little about any of them?

I have, as of the moment of writing, seen only one published comment on
Robertson’s remarks that contains any analysis or explanation at all:
an entry by Ronald Lindsay in the blog of the Center for Inquiry under
the title “One Cheer (Amid a Chorus of Boos) for Pat Robertson.” Lindsay offers Robertson a left-handed commendation for exposing by his example the absurdity of religious belief. He writes:

In recent years, in response to increased critical examination of
religion, many liberal religious apologists have claimed that these
critiques of religion have it all wrong. There is no all-powerful,
personal God, overseeing and intervening in our world, who guides
hurricanes away or toward land depending on His will. Instead, there is
only some nebulous spirit or life-force that fills us with joy, and
makes us want to join hands and sing “Kumbaya.” In fact, some scholars,
such as Karen Armstrong, argue that religion is not about belief in a
personal God at all, but about commitment and activity.

For the ordinary believer this is all rubbish. Ordinary
believers—and they do believe—have faith in a robust God, who can
deliver them
from evil (or not). Pat Robertson reflects the views of the ordinary
believer. You see them all the time on TV being interviewed after some
natural disaster. They claim they prayed to God to spare them from the
tornado/hurricane/earthquake and God answered their prayers. Notably,
the people who died can’t speak to the issue of why
their
prayers were not answered, but Robertson at
least tries to offer an explanation. The victims were cursed for some
reason, and in the case of Haiti it was because of an imprudent pact
with the Devil. (Is there ever a prudent pact with the Devil?)

Of course, Pat Robertson’s claim is absurd. But his claim usefully
underscores the absurdity of religious belief in general, instead of
obscuring it with a veil of touchy-feely doubletalk.

In other words, Robertson, in Lindsay’s view, is a reductio ad absurdum of religious belief, and thus a walking argument for atheism. Sophisticated apologists for religion like Karen Armstrong
try to disown the excesses of such cranks, but their notions of what it
means to believe in God have little bearing on what ordinary religious
people actually believe. Ordinary religious people believe in a God
that intervenes in the affairs of the world to reward the faithful and
punish the unfaithful—the God of Pat Robertson, or something very like
it. Many of them may dislike Robertson’s conclusions, but they are
committed to the same premises and the same logic. His absurdities are
therefore theirs.

Thus Lindsay. Now there is an obvious non sequitur here.
Granted that, as Lindsay claims, the lofty sophistications of theology
do not reflect the beliefs of ordinary religious people, and granted
that, as he also claims, the beliefs of ordinary religious people
entail the absurd conclusions of a Pat Robertson, it does not follow
that Robertson’s conclusions exhibit “the absurdity of religious belief
in general.” All that follows is that they exhibit the absurdities of
common forms of religious belief.

That conclusion, however, seems to me notable by itself; and it
suggests to me an explanation of why so little has been said about what
was outrageous in Robertson’s remarks. Most people who believe in God,
I suspect, would disavow any claim to prophetic insight. They would
deny that they know what worldly events may be attributed to God’s
influence, or what God “means” by them. Yet nearly all such people
believe that worldly events do show God’s influence and that God does
mean something by them. So even if they disclaim knowledge
of how God works in the world, they feel free—or perhaps “compelled”
would be more like it—to venture judgments about such matters. The lone
survivor of an automobile collision says, “God must have kept me alive
for a reason!” Oh, and did he cause everyone else to be killed for an
equally good reason? Someone makes repeated efforts to succeed in a
certain line of work before finally giving up: “God must have meant me
for other things.” Well, that is one way to reassure yourself that you
made the right choice: pretend that your perfectly ordinary human
decision had divine authorization. And so on.

People who think this way may find Robertson’s conclusions offensive
because it is inhumane toward the victims of catastrophe to believe
such things; or they may condemn his giving public utterance to such
conclusions as “totally inappropriate”; neither objection has anything
to do with the truth or falsehood of the conclusions. Such objections
leave standing the possibility that what Robertson says, his historical
delusions aside, may be perfectly true: they merely fault him for saying or perhaps merely believing
such things. I suspect that the reason why we do not hear much about
what is outrageous in his remarks is that identifying it means
identifying what is outrageous in widely and strongly held religious
beliefs, namely the idea that God’s actions and intentions can be
discerned in worldly events.

Friday, January 8, 2010

Carl Sagan’s work is a great reminder of the ethical aspect of skepticism: without the ability to distinguish between prejudice and “postjudice,” or between what is true and what feels good, we may “slide, almost without noticing, into superstition and darkness.”

One thing that stands out in them is how skepticism was for Carl Sagan a deeply ethical enterprise, not just a debunking hobby, or a way to show how smart we are compared to the numbskulls who believe nonsense. For Sagan, as for so many other leaders in skepticism—though it is not often framed like this—his skepticism came out of a kind of deep moral imperative. Because undue credulity causes so much measurable harm, it follows that there is an ethical obligation to work to mitigate it through speaking out and educating our neighbors. Whether you believe that space aliens are coming to Earth to solve all our problems so we don’t have to do any work to fix them ourselves, or you believe that going to a faith healer or New Age huckster rather than relying on medical science to heal you is the right course of medical care, believing in things uncritically can be bad for you and bad for society. Sagan felt that it was the right thing—the morally conscientious thing—to work against those trends.

Another writer again agreed with all my generalities, but said that as an inveterate skeptic I have closed my mind to the truth. Most notably I have ignored the evidence for an Earth that is six thousand years old. Well, I haven’t ignored it; I considered the purported evidence and then rejected it. There is a difference, and this is a difference, we might say, between prejudice and postjudice. Prejudice is making a judgment before you have looked at the facts. Postjudice is making a judgment afterwards. Prejudice is terrible, in the sense that you commit injustices and you make serious mistakes. Postjudice is not terrible. You can’t be perfect of course; you may make mistakes also. But it is permissible to make a judgment after you have examined the evidence. In some circles it is even encouraged.

It is salutary to remember such things when one is accused of being “closed-minded” (or “close-minded,” in the cretinous mangling of the phrase that seems to be coming into favor on the Web) for disparaging claims of events that run contrary to common experience and well-founded scientific conclusions. Being “open-minded” or unprejudiced does not mean refusing to draw conclusions. If Charlie Brown is a perfect skeptic, he must acknowledge that it is possible that, if he runs to kick the football this time, Lucy will let him do so. But, given that she has snatched the football away at the last moment on all previous occasions, he has good reason to believe that she will do the same thing to him this time. That is not a prejudice. That is a warranted conclusion from experience.

There’s another reason I think popularizing science is important, why I try to do it. It’s a foreboding I have—maybe ill-placed—of an America in my children’s generation, or my grandchildren’s generation, when all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when we’re a service and information-processing economy; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest even grasps the issues; when the people (by “the people” I mean the broad population in a democracy) have lost the ability to set their own agendas, or even to knowledgeably question those who do set the agendas; when there is no practice in questioning those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and religiously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in steep decline, unable to distinguish between what’s true and what feels good, we slide, almost without noticing, into superstition and darkness.

In a previous entry, I raised the question whether there is really any such thing as a “harmless superstition,” and suggested that there is no such thing, but only a distinction between less and more harmful superstitions. Sagan’s reflections seem to me in agreement with this thought.